Clinton Welfare Plan Looks Less Sweeping

June 11, 1994|By Washington Post

WASHINGTON — President Clinton promised during the campaign to ''end welfare as we know it,'' yet the comprehensive plan he will submit to Congress next week would leave a vast number of welfare recipients in the old system for years to come.

Even under the best of circumstances, about half of the estimated 5.5 million adults on welfare would continue collecting checks with no new work requirements five years after Clinton's program took effect, according to the administration's projections.

The main reason so many adult welfare recipients would be left unaffected by the president's plan for years is that it has been tailored primarily for unmarried mothers in their teens and early 20s, to the exclusion of older women, who would remain in the old system.

More troubling to some critics of Clinton's plan is the relative paucity of publicly funded or subsidized jobs that would be available to Aid to Families with Dependent Children recipients trying to end their dependency on the state.

The administration said this week there would be about 350,000 government-generated jobs available within five years, or equivalent to about 6 percent of the adult welfare population, and 400,000 such jobs by the year 2004, or 7 percent of the total.

Rep. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., a leader of a House GOP task force on welfare reform, calls Clinton's projected jobs program woefully inadequate, noting that the Republican plan would provide a minimum of 700,000 public service or subsidized jobs.

Shortly after the election, Clinton transition officials discussed the possibility of creating as many as 1.5 million community service or government-subsidized jobs for welfare recipients who couldn't find work. Since then, however, officials have dramatically scaled back their plan, in part because of Clinton's unwillingness to spend more on the program by raising taxes.